


i wonder what keeps us so high up

by veidtous



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-06-10 18:43:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6969712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veidtous/pseuds/veidtous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where you dream your soulmates experiences in life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wonder what keeps us so high up

“I haven’t dreamt about anyone yet. Maybe I don’t have one.”

Four beers in and the world is spinning around a sixteen year old Marco, huddling for warmth with five friends on a roof six feet above the ground. They tell him to give it time, that it’s inevitable and that sooner or later he’ll start to dream about someone else. Marco laughs freely, kicks one of them in the foot, and then knocks over the pyramid of empty cans off the edge of the roof.

Who really needs a soulmate, he thinks.

He’s doing just fine without one.

  
  
  
  


The first dream comes when he’s sixteen, four months away from his next birthday. The day is inauspicious from start to finish; class, work, goofing around the neighborhood with friends as the sun goes down and the moon takes its’ rightful place in the sky. He brushes his teeth, grabs a quick bite of lemon pie that burns against his clean gums, and goes to bed.

At first Marco thinks it’s a normal. He sees the sun, the sky, the birds flying over vermillion treetop leaves in autumn - the sound of laughter muted against the gust of wind howling against his ears. It feels like a scene in a movie as his eyes move from his feet, to his legs, up his arms and then…

He sees a building that he doesn’t recognize, but does in this moment, somehow. His sub-conscious mind tells him that this is home and with every fiber of his being wants to protest that no, it is not. When the hand that is his (but isn’t) touches the door, his eyes open and Marco’s vision is filled with his beige colored ceiling.

“What the hell.”

Marco’s fingers go to his eyes and press against them to decorate his vision with flashing stars. It was just a dream, nothing more and nothing less. It’s not even something worthwhile to talk about with Ann or any of his other friends. So he says nothing, does nothing about it. Marco keeps it locked away with the other dreams in some invisible box that he has no desire to think of again.

  
  
  
  


The second dream comes when he’s nineteen, fourteen days after his birthday. The leaves are no longer brilliant shades of red, gold, and brown - the wind hurts his ears, even beneath the earmuffs he can swear he can still feel the softness of their cotton when he wakes up. Another laugh, and a shove against his back this time.

‘ _Hey             ! Hurry up or we’ll be late!_ ” A voice Marco doesn’t know calls out to him, using a name he can never remember when he wakes up.

After the wakes, Marco pulls himself out of the house, hurrying out the front door to where Ann is waiting for him. She pulls a face as he approaches her with hair disheveled and cheeks red in anticipation.

“What’s wrong with you?” She doesn’t touch him, she knows better by this point that physical contact is something Marco’s always shied away from save for his family. Instead she nudges him with her foot as they start walking towards the shops.

“I keep having these weird dreams.” He doesn’t want to go more into it, knows what she’ll say before he even goes into detail. Marco wrinkles his nose, looks over at her from the corner of his eyes and groans when he notices the wicked smile on her lips. It’s all over now, he thinks.

“You have a soulmate mister. I told you you’d get one eventually.” Marco groans louder and puts his hands over his eyes. It’s not that he doesn’t want one, or maybe it is. Maybe it’s not important for him at this moment, maybe there are other things he wants to fill his head at night while his body rests. He wants the freedom and plasticity of a working mind that’s not clouded by the experiences of another living person he’s never met.

“How do I turn it off?” Marco asks.

Ann just laughs, shaking her head as she replies. “I don’t think it works like that. Better get used to it.”

  
  
  
  


Dreams four and five come back to back mid-way through his nineteenth year. His twenties seem so close and all his friends are making plans to take him over to Munich for a weekend of shenanigan filled hilarity. They tell him they’ve picked out all the clubs they’re going to go to, all the places they’re going to eat, all the things they’re going to see and do and experience, yet all Marco can think of is if this other person tied to him like he is to them by such a fragile, unbreakable bond, will be able to share the feelings with him.

The third dream shows a dark bedroom with pastel blue walls and white plush carpet. It has wooden dresser drawers next to a bed with a black duvet draped overtop of the mattress. He sees himself (the body, rather, he knows this isn’t _him_ ) drop on top of it with a heavy sigh. Marco can’t hear the voice necessarily, but he can feel the familiar relief of letting out a hard breath of air. He’s been there so often in life, knows he knows that feeling by heart now. The person rolls to their side (he rolls, sluggishly) and runs their hands through their hair.

‘ _What’s wrong?_ ’ Marco wants to say but can’t. His voice won’t work, his mouth won’t move save for the steady breathing that the other person practices.

When Marco wakes up he feels his chest is too tight to breath.

He almost wants to cry.

  
  
  
  


Four comes the following night.

He’s (they’re) at a party surrounded by unfamiliar faces and red plastic cups with names scribbled out in permanent black marker. _If only_ , Marco thinks, _I can make these eyes look down_. He knows that’s not how it works, all he’s seeing are memories, experiences of things that have already come to be and have since passed - but hopes deep down one day that it’ll work.

The person (him) moves through the door; ducking in and out and in-between various doorways and people before finding their friend. The person shouts at them, throws an arm around their (Marco’s) shoulders and shakes him with joy.

‘ _Can you believe that! It’s crazy right?!_ ’

They laugh (Marco laughs) as they dig their fingertips into their friends ribs. Marco can feel their mouth moving, can feel the tingling sensation of speech on his own pair when he wakes the next morning. He can never remember what they said, or how their voice sounds.

At breakfast Marco wonders if it’s worth it, and lies to himself and to Ann when he says he hates having a soulmate.

  
  
  
  


Five, six, seven, eight, fifteen, sixteen, and so on come and go. Sometimes they hold something significant like a party where he starts to remember more of the person’s friend who always seems to be hovering around them. Marco wakes from those dreams to the feeling of liquor heavy in his stomach and peace settling on an always nervous mind. Other times they’re painful; a physical injury from something previous Marco has yet to witness but the phantom ache stays in his legs, in his arms, in his neck.

The ones where he wakes with tears collecting in the corner of his eyes are the ones that make Ann suggest they try to look for his soulmate when they’re awake, rather than strictly in Marco’s dreams.

“Start making a dream journal,” Ann suggests one day over milkshakes and a shared plate of fries. “It might help you look over stuff later if you have something to reference.”

Marco wants to tell her that he’s absolutely not going to start writing a journal of someone else’s life, but instead slides more fries to his side of the plate.

“Yeah whatever. I’m not letting you read it though.” He smiles underneath a particularly salty fry and almost chokes on it when Ann shoves him off the chair.

  
  
  
  


The journal acts as nothing but a point of frustration for Marco at first. Each dream gives him nothing but a printed recollection of a person he may never meet in his life, and begins to wonder if he can love this person as he’s meant to.

(If he doesn’t already).

“It’s not helping. I still don’t know anything.” Marco shoves the leather bound book across the floor to Ann who’s lounging back on his bed, playing with something on her phone. They’re twenty-four now, past school, past university, settling into their adult lives at a steady pace that’s just as nerve-racking as they imagined it would be.

She scoops it off the floor and flips through it. Years of notes, horrible sketches, cliff notes and translations to English to German and back again litter each page from top to bottom. Ann snorts and throws it back at Marco who snorts right back at her.

“What are you talking about? You could write a damn book about this person Marco.” She flops back down on the bed and resumes typing on her phone.

“Yeah, about what? How they skinned their knee that one time after they got knocked off the swing, or how they got stood up, or -” Marco stops as he feels his face heat up which causes Ann to snort again, but giving him the grace of not looking at him while she does so. He knows his answer, knows she figured it out way before him as she always does.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re the worst best friend anyone could ever have?” Marco’s confident she won’t believe him, understands that they’ve been friends for too long to know that anything said so fleetingly would never be meant seriously.

Ann just resumes typing away at her phone, the soft sound of her nails clicking against the glass sounds through their apartment as Marco turns his head down towards to the journal again. He’s never thought to look at it like a novel, rather broken pieces of a person that he’s supposed to be able to call his own.

  
  
  
  


“What if they don’t like me?”

It’s not a matter of finding them anymore. Another year down, another journal started detailing all of the places this person has been, seen, felt, witnessed, and done. There are times Marco feels like he knows this person’s life better than his own at this point; twenty-five marks a quarter of his life down and if a person spends a third of their life sleeping, has he spent half of his thinking of this person?

They’re at a cafe in Munich, sitting underneath a green and white polka-dotted canopy with frozen coffee and half eaten lunches placed between them.

“Are you seriously asking me that now?”

Marco puts his hands over his face when he hears Ann’s tone. Self-consciousness is never attractive on a person, or that’s what he’s always been told. But was that really true? Was that truly a factor when it came to love, adoration, respect? He doesn’t look at her as he hears Ann pick up her coffee and take a long sip, munch on a cracker and cut some of the remaining cheese from their wooden plate.

“Marco.”

That’s when he lets his fingers separate from each other to look over at her from across the table. She’s smiling; that warm smile that he was lucky to be able to see so often.

“You’re an idiot. You’re probably driving this person crazy and when I finally meet them I’m going to make them take me to dinner for having to deal with this for so long.”

Marco almost wants to cry. Instead he puts his hands back over his face and smiles.

“You got a piece of grape skin in your teeth.”

She kicks him under the table, laughing.

  
  
  
  


Twenty-six is when it changes. A decade of heartbreak, longing, willfulness, and hopelessness, and finally something changes. Marco dreams of a park with delicate shades of blue, yellow, and saffron. A dog barks, a child laughs, and someone else is humming some popular tune that’s been played on the radio five times this week.

He wakes up, violently throws himself out of bed to barrel towards Ann’s room, kicking open her door when he reaches it.

“Marco what the fuck.”

She’s isn’t sitting up, she doesn’t want to even bother with the thought of it. Ann merely rolls on her side away from the light in the hallway and pulls the covers up over her head.

“Ann. Wake the fuck up, we gotta go to the park now.”

Marco goes over to the bed and starts pulling on the sheets. He nudges the bed with his knees and it’s only when he starts to climb up on top of the mattress down Ann shove him back to the floor that she sits up.

“And why should we do that at eight in the morning on a Saturday?”

His throat starts to close. He can feel the pressure building underneath his tear ducts and in the pit of his stomach. Marco opens his mouth and closes it again, mimicking that of a fish out of water as his hands clench and release by his side in tandem.

“They were there yesterday. At the park. I’m sure of it.”

  
  
  
  


The first day no one shows up, or, no one that Marco can pinpoint. He looks over the journal and denotes that person had worn a pair of black sweats and a gray sweater for the still chilly spring months of Germany. The likelihood of the person wearing the same exact thing over and over and over again seems farfetched but then again, isn’t that what soulmates are?

An impossible likelihood set to pull two people together in a world with billions.

The least this person can do, Marco thinks, is make it easier on him after ten years of memorizing anything he can about them. Ann suggests that he wear the same thing to, to give this person a break. He almost wants to kiss her, but after saying it they both pull and face and avoid each other for the rest of the day.

They reconcile later by watching reality television and sharing a bowl of popcorn.

  
  
  
  


“You sure you can do this on your own?” Ann looks at him nervously for the first time in years as Marco combs his hair to the side which is so much more red than it used to be when he was young. Ann says it looks better on him anyway.

“No, but it’s now or never, right?” Treat it like a bandaid, Marco thinks, treat it like something that has gashed him and left him scarred but has also given the same wound time to heal. Now it was time to see the result of all those years in agony.

He goes to the same tree he has the first couple of days and sits beneath it like always. The same light blue cotton sweater on clinging to his chest with a pair of black pants. His hat in his hands, earrings in. A couple passes, holding hands and whispering amongst themselves and Marco hopes that’ll be him someday soon.

Hours pass, more people move about and the hope that had been so full at the start of the day has finally started to spill between the cracks in the glass bottle that is his life. Dusk comes and when he can’t see anyone else in the park, he bows his head and rests his forehead against clothed knees. No sound comes from his throat, only a shaking breath in and out and in and out and -

“Uh... hello?”

Marco’s head shoots up and in front of him he spots a familiar pair of black and gray and sun kissed skin peeking out from their wrists. This is it, Marco thinks, this is that hallelujah he’s been looking for.

He meets the person’s eyes and feels his breath leave him for good as they smile down at him and offer their hand.

“I’m Mario.”

  
  
  
  


It comes as a whirlwind after that. A nameless face becomes Mario, Sunny Mario, who Marco can finally touch and feel the heat radiating off of him like silent reassurance that This Is Real. Marco almost drops dead when Mario comes over to his and Ann’s apartment for the first time and she cries and clings onto him.

She tells him she knows everything about him, and that he owes her lunch for all these missed years.

Marco’s heart twists into a tight knot when Mario promises to take her out soon and gives her his phone number to make sure.

  
  
  
  


It isn’t easy. Marco knew that in the pit of his stomach deep down, nothing was ever easy in this life, but the first time he lets Mario see tears in his eyes and a worried lip he knows it’ll be okay.

With each tear that rolls off his lashes, Mario kisses the side of his face and holds onto him with steady hands whispering that he is here, that it is okay.

That he’s not alone anymore.

But he never was, not really.

  
  
  
  


Years pass; twenty-six becomes thirty-six. Ten years of dedication and love have led to rings on bony fingers, both him and Ann. Mario remarks how much nicer Ann’s looked and Marco quips that an all white wedding would look horrible and that just because Mario has a flawless complexion doesn’t mean the rest of the world does.

Mario just smirks, kisses the ring on top Marco’s head before sliding down into the space between his side and the sofa.

“Do you remember that time when we were kids and…” Marco trails off, realizing that Mario was never really _there_ , not physically, and as he catches himself in his words Mario’s face changes. He snatches one of Marco’s hands off his lap and gives it a squeeze, the metal of their rings pressing against one another.

“Yeah, I do.”

  
  
  
  
  


This is happiness, he thinks, this is what he’s been waiting for. It’s like a breath of fresh air; a manifested destiny that, instead of taunting him with fleeting glances and phantom touches, has given him that first sip from that Holy Grail of love and ever-after.

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> work is Still Stressful but i miss writing so here we go again. title of the song is from the song 'death' by white lies! i've always liked the ideal of soulmates but i like the ones past just like, oh the name tattooed or w/e ja feel? ideally gonna do a bunch of one-shots of soulmates in series. 
> 
> thank you for reading and any comments and kudos are always appreciated xo


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